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The Future: Part II

Future of Policing Essays: American Policing in 2022

Part II

During the next few weeks I will be publishing excerpts from twenty or more of these essays with the hope of generating some discussion on what these police leaders and academics have to say about the future of our men and women in blue.

“Law enforcement executives all over the world are traditionally tasked with similar missions, including:

Suppressing crime

Collaborating with the community to determine service expectations

Working closely with all levels of local, county, state, and federal governments

Aligning available law enforcement resources to determine and meet all safety and security expectations effectively and efficiently

“While those mission objectives are not likely to change over the next 10 years, successful law enforcement agencies will expand the expertise of their personnel in the use of proven business management principles and techniques that will complement their crime-fighting, leadership, and communication capabilities (my emphasis). Adding these business tools will assist agencies in not only providing effective safety and security services but also providing them through a management capability that will rival successful businesses all over the world.

“As a major drain of any city budget, the law enforcement agency will operate more efficiently to ensure the equitable distribution of limited public funds. Through the development of a solid law enforcement business management culture, those mission objectives identified above will be reached effectively by the expanded commitment to manage the agency as a business system comprised of interrelated working parts, namely:

“The management model that will be used to transition agencies to a state of law enforcement business excellence will be based on a complementary relationship of compliance with generally accepted national and/or state accreditation standards and international business management standards, currently managed by the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) (my emphasis). Through this complementary relationship, the law enforcement agency will have added considerable value to its accreditation process, streamlined the compliance/maintenance processes, enabled and encouraged the development of relevant performance metrics beyond traditional law enforcement measurements, and effectively responded to recent economic challenges. This effective balance between law enforcement compliance and business performance will continue to elevate each agency’s relationship with the community it serves…

“The following principles will be used throughout the organization to enhance the management system components identified above:

Customer focus.

Leadership.

Involvement of people.

Process approach.

Quality and Performance Management.

System approach to management.

Continual improvement.

Factual approach to decision-making.

Mutually beneficial supplier relationships.”

[Michael T. Frazier, chief of police, Surprise, Arizona.

+++++++++++++

“Community building cannot be viewed as the secondary but primary objective(my emphasis) of police departments. The police have to play a lead role in this process because community members will take the path of least resistance and demand everything from the police and expect nothing from themselves in creating a safer place.

To begin the process of community building, the police can do three things:

Work to build a culturally competent community: People who live in diverse communities fear demographic change, and that fear leads efforts to leverage the police to mitigate that fear. Building a competent community creates a working trust between communities of color and the dominate race and removes the police from the middle…

Stop letting residents off the hook: Generally, residents don’t care much about crime until it impacts them. Residents view themselves as consumers of services without any responsibility to serve one another to build a collective future…

Get patrol officers to focus on community- building outcomes: Police organizations have orientated patrol officers as a group to focus almost exclusively in arcane enforcement-only crime control tasks. Police departments don’t promote, measure, or reward (and thereby don’t value) community-building policing approaches. Because of this failure in leadership, patrol officers are stuck in a perpetual cycle of low-reward and high-stress enforcement-only strategies… Patrol officers are a police department’s greatest source of ideas and commensurate strategies for this community-building approach to policing. It’s high time that police leaders engage these resources as the assets they are.

“For police to be relevant and effective in the next 10 years, our approach of symptom-based, enforcement-based tactics must morph to a more sustainable and effective model. By leveraging the assets of the community, we can begin to create an intended future for our communities where the outcomes are more significant and conditions that lead to crime have been changed.”